Come this weekend, much of the Raptors organization will set up camp in Las Vegas. It'll be a fitting setting for a prelude to a coming season that amounts to a roll of the dice.

Come this weekend, much of the Raptors organization will set up camp in Las Vegas. It'll be a fitting setting for a prelude to a coming season that amounts to a roll of the dice.

There was no end of hyperbole slung yesterday around the Air Canada Centre, where Chris Bosh and Jermaine O'Neal, the incumbent all-star and his newly acquired front-line running mate, were likened to the new-era version of Tim Duncan and David Robinson, the duelling seven footers who led the San Antonio Spurs to a couple of championships together in 1999 and 2003.

The similarities aren't exactly striking: Neither Bosh nor O'Neal, for one thing, stands seven feet. They're both 6-10 or so. And seeing as Duncan and Robinson own between them three MVP trophies and six championship rings, Bosh and O'Neal, with zero and zero, respectively, have more than a couple of inches to make up.

The trade that sent T.J. Ford, Rasho Nesterovic and first-round draft pick Roy Hibbert to Indianapolis for O'Neal and Nathan Jawai can be viewed as a win-now move, and this corner is usually all for those. But this stroke obviously isn't as bold as the one made last summer by the champion Boston Celtics, who committed to exceeding the luxury tax – spent money to make money, in other words – while surrounding their big acquisition, Kevin Garnett, with the right role players.

The Raptors, committed to not exceeding the tax threshold, have no freedom to fill out a roster that's looking awfully shallow. So this is a go-for-it-now move that doesn't go far enough – if, that is, the championship is the goal.

And perhaps this is the kind of roster a risk-taker like Bryan Colangelo, the Raptors GM, was destined to be left with after his best bets backfired. Many of his moves in his two-plus years in Toronto have been gutsy, but also fraught with long-term downside that has often come home to roost. Similarly, trading a first-round pick for a soon-to-be 30-year-old like O'Neal is a gamble a lot of elite teams don't make unless it puts them on the title's doorstep.

Even if acquiring O'Neal turns the Raptors into a top-five team in the East – and that's no given when you look at Philadelphia's signing of Elton Brand yesterday, and when you consider that Boston, Detroit, Cleveland and Orlando are all formidable – the future's cloudy. A team that once billed itself as young and upcoming will likely start just one player under 27, Bosh. As unassailably sensible a signing as Jose Calderon is, he's 27 and perhaps nearing his peak. And it's not as though the Raptors are stocked with on-the-verge youth.

In other words, they're likely headed for unenviable status, a couple of notches below a championship contender, but not nearly bad enough to acquire a blue-chip draft pick. That's perfectly acceptable when the core's young and vastly talented and ever-improving. It's not anymore.

Hope resides in the prospect of salary-cap space in the summer of 2010, when O'Neal's contract expires and Bosh can choose free agency. But let's not forget that one of the fundamental assumptions of Colangelo's reins-taking strategy was that, while American-born free agents have historically been loathe to come to Toronto, the Europeans love the place. "It's like home," said Calderon, the Spaniard, yesterday. But with the Euro-pipeline drying up, Colangelo might best spend his free time lobbying to get ESPN on Canadian TV.

It's tediously familiar territory, the question of the next two seasons about to become, "Will Bosh stay or go?" Don't feel sorry for yourself, Raptor Fan. Your counterpart in Cleveland, where there's already ceaseless theorizing on the 2010 exit plans of LeBron James, has it worse. This is what happens when a plan falls apart, when a hyper-talented point guard like Ford proves insufferable, when a No. 1 overall pick doesn't make himself a household name. O'Neal, to that end, referred to Bargnani as "André" yesterday. So the Vegas bonding can't come soon enough.

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